The present disclosure relates to a vehicle for moving picked produce and in particular to a method and system for a semi-autonomous vehicle to transport picked produce from a row of plants in a field to a distribution location.
For centuries, produce has been grown from a field of rows that define a farmer's land. The produce is harvested by people (called pickers) hand picking the ripe produce in each row. This is a slow and tedious process that is not well suited for commercial operations, but allows the farmer to obtain the best produce from their crop.
The pickers place the picked produce into a small container and carry it to a farm road for collection several times a day. The produce carried to the farm road (or a distribution location) is collected by a tractor or truck for delivery to the processing plant. The process of filling a container with picked produce and walking or running the container to and from a distribution location at the end of a row for delivery repeats all day and is physically exhausting.
A row of ripe produce for picking may be hundreds of feet long, so it can take a few minutes to walk a container to and from the road. Thus, the average picker spends about thirty percent of his day walking to and from the road with full or empty containers. On a given day during harvest, a farmer may have over a hundred pickers in the field.
In certain areas, the demand for manual labor during the relatively short picking season has placed a strain on the available labor pool. Current labor rates also place a strain on profit margins so, therefore, the need has arisen for apparatus capable of assisting the pickers to harvest substantial acreage of produce per unit of time in an acceptable manner without damaging the fruit and/or injuring the pickers.
Over the years, various farmers and companies have tried to automate the produce picking and delivery process with a large gas powered system. For example, GK Machine developed the Mercado system that spans five rows to carry picked strawberries, and Agrobot and Harvest Crew Robotics developed tractors to pick and carry strawberries from a row of plants. Unfortunately, these systems, like many other large scale machines that have tried to reduce or eliminate the work of a picker, are rarely used for various reasons, including: cost to manufacture and repair, increased fruit damage and decreased fruit quality during picking and transport, noise and pollution, inability to function in different terrain and weather conditions, constraints on labor force, etc. Thus, there is a need for a small, quiet, reliable and individualized electric vehicle that can transport the produce to and from the pickers so that the pickers can maximize their time to collect the best produce possible in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of physical effort.
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the present disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the concepts of this present disclosures.